About 9 am Thursday, Maj Nidal M Hasan walked over to see a neighbour in his aging apartment building here on the edge of downtown. He had come to say goodbye.

The two occasionally would sit together in plastic chairs beneath a wind chime on the landing outside her second-floor apartment, she recalled. She was Christian and he was Muslim, but they shared coffee and talked about God. But this morning, Hasan said that he would be deploying to Afghanistan soon and that he did not want to go. He gave her a copy of the Koran.

“I’m going to do good work for God,” he told her.

Then he walked downstairs, through the grassy courtyard, stepped into his silver Honda Civic and drove to Fort Hood. Four hours later, he allegedly opened fire in the Soldier Readiness Center in a rampage that killed 13 people and wounded 38, the deadliest shooting ever on a US military installation.

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, had moved into the 27-unit Casa del Norte apartments in late July when he was transferred to Ford Hood from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the District. During his nearly four-month stay in apartment No. 9, Hasan made few friends. Most other tenants didn’t know his name, referring to him as “Number Nine.”

They said he often left his one-bedroom apartment at 5 or 6 in the morning, dressed in his uniform. Hasan usually did not return home until 6 or 7 in the evening, sometimes dressed in traditional Muslim clothes and carrying a Koran.

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